1933

Philadelphia struck 445,500 double eagles dated 1933, but none were officially released for commerce. President Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102 issued April 5, 1933 directed the return of most privately held U.S. gold coin to the Federal Reserve and prohibited further distribution. The 1933 double eagles in Mint vaults were caught by this order and marked for destruction. The Mint melted the full production over the following years, reducing the series' final year to an accounting entry rather than a circulating coinage. Officially, no 1933 double eagle entered private hands. Unofficially, a small number escaped the Philadelphia Mint, most likely through Mint cashier George McCann, who had access to the bags of 1933 coins before their transfer to the melting furnace. Federal agents identified and confiscated most of the known escapees during the 1940s and 1950s.

One example took a different path. A 1933 double eagle reached King Farouk of Egypt through an American coin dealer, and the U.S. State Department issued an export license in 1944 on the mistaken assumption that it was a legal-ownership specimen. When Farouk's 1952 overthrow scattered his collection, the coin disappeared for four decades before resurfacing in a 1996 U.S. Secret Service sting operation involving British coin dealer Stephen Fenton. A five-year legal dispute produced a 2001 settlement: the Treasury formally monetized the single coin as legal tender, making it the only 1933 double eagle a private collector may legally own. Ten additional examples, discovered by the family of Philadelphia dealer Israel Switt in a 2003 safe-deposit-box find and known as the Langbord coins, were confiscated after more than a decade of litigation. The Supreme Court declined to hear the Langbord family's appeal in 2017, and the ten coins are held at Fort Knox. Two additional 1933 double eagles reside permanently in the Smithsonian's National Numismatic Collection.

The Farouk coin, now the sole privately ownable 1933 double eagle, has traded at two of the highest prices in coin collecting history. Sotheby's and Stack's jointly sold it on July 30, 2002 for $7,590,020, a world record at the time. The buyer, later identified as shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, held the coin for nearly two decades before consigning it to Sotheby's, where it sold on June 8, 2021 for $18,872,250, the highest price ever paid for a coin at auction. Grade distribution is a moot analytical category since the surviving Mint State population is a fixed, identified set of coins. Collector demand for additional 1933 double eagles remains theoretical: the legal status of any further discovery would be determined by the federal government under the Langbord precedent. The Farouk coin is, effectively, the only 1933 double eagle that will ever trade privately, and its pricing trajectory reflects that legal singularity as much as its numismatic status. For the broader context of the 1933 Saint-Gaudens story and the end of U.S. gold coinage as legal tender, see the St. Gaudens Gold $20 Double Eagles history article.